Catalan Separatists Say They Won’t Block Sanchez Government

(Bloomberg) -- Esquerra Republicana, a Catalan separatist party, signaled it wouldn’t seek to prevent Pedro Sanchez from forming a new government, potentially boosting his bid to remain Spain’s prime minister.

“We didn’t come to block anything,” Gabriel Rufian, parliamentary spokesman for Esquerra Republicana, known as ERC, said at a news conference in Madrid following talks with Socialist spokeswoman Adriana Lastra. “We need to talk.”

Sanchez may need ERC, which won 15 seats in the April national elections, to support his bid to stay on as prime minister in a parliamentary vote slated for next month. Sanchez’s contacts this week with the People’s Party and Ciudadanos, two parties to his right politically, failed to yield any change in their positions. Both have refused to support a Socialist-led government.

Dealing with ERC, a pro-independence party that backed a failed 2017 bid to split Catalonia from Spain, carries a political cost for Sanchez. Rufian said ERC would not give the prime minister a “blank check” and that talks with the Socialists are only beginning.

“We have asked the same from all parties -- that they don’t block the investiture because there is no alternative,” the Socialists’ Lastra said.

To contact the reporter on this story: Charles Penty in Madrid at cpenty@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Chad Thomas at cthomas16@bloomberg.net, Jerrold Colten, Dan Liefgreen

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